New Year’s Eve, 1913

Many apocalyptic sects believed the world would end in 1914. Some taught that possessing pictures, “graven images,” violated the second commandment, the punishment: burning in hell rather than enjoying the millennial peace of the righteous. Thus my grandmother’s dilemma.

The other graven images they burned
Thanksgiving Day, buffet of frames and silver
plate drifts God-ward, mercuric vapors, sepia
fragments rising. But Oskar, she keeps back,
he’s featured only when she grips
his sailor-knickered pose—stilted shade
of a first-born, dead and quick to evanesce.

She soothes a finger down the outline
of his jaw, strokes bones where baby softness
scarcely keeps the round. It feels abandon
not to conjure him, blue-eyed. Although she
dreads the certitude of hell, without the
children living now, she’d make millennial
trade-off for clear sight of him.

Last night again the dream of altar rock
so sharp it slices through her swollen gut.
“Ma, where is the lamb for the holocaust?”
In torture she lays him on the pyre—
hope against hope for a ram—
but only the ash of this photograph
she paid for with chickens floats back.

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Qarrtsiluni (2005-2013) was a groundbreaking online literary magazine, one of the first to fully exploit blog software. Though we never quite realized our dream of creating a print-on-demand option for each issue, being online does mean that our back issues remain accessible indefinitely, so there's that. And we published some damn fine stuff — check it out.

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